Page 664 - Mute As a Button

Author Notes:

Story of my life. Eventually, you just go with your instincts and don't ask questions when it comes to NPC quirks. Of course, if your party loves quirky one-shot NPCs and wants to see more of them, it can backfire massively.

Never intended to be important... hmm, has it been long enough that my memory is fading on the NPCs I've had like this?

Oh, there was the captain of a pirate ship. The pirates were just intended as a one-off to help the PCs cross a sea, but the cleric ended up dating the captain and so he and his crew became reoccurring. The other PCs got attached to the ship, helping out and earning seamanship skills.

I've got something close. One of my fellow players under a rather clueless DM I was running with in Job Corps, created a wizard character who followed the god, "Dee Emm", and was known to do random stuff just because. After the short-lived campaign that character was used in, we the players and DM enjoyed the sillyness of this character enough to make him a quasi Deus ex Machina DM NPC, doing such wonderful things like helping us get away from some dudes via a door from the robes/cloak of useful things, or running a store warehouse of almost everything in the DMG for magical gear, from +1 daggers to the whole gambit of Ioun stones... and a magical belt attachment that looked tacky, but held all the money the player could ever carry (one of those coin dispencer belts, except it held copper/silver/electrum/gold/platinum peices).

I once had a throwaway NPC mook become an actual party member this way.

This was during my Holy Hellraiders campaign ("His Holiness Pope Francis I has been abducted by demons! Can the Vatican's finest brave the perils of the Inferno itself to rescue the Pontiff?!"), and the party was still in Rome tracking down a satanic cult. The party kicked down the door of the bad guy's hideout while they were in the middle of a demonic summoning ritual.

One of the cultist mooks was a morbidly obese man I dubbed "Neckbeard," who waddled into combat waving a katana and tonfa while screaming "Banzai desu!" He couldn't land a single blow with either of his weapons (being utterly incompetent), but the party could not injure Neckbeard no matter how many times they stabbed or shot him (bad damage rolls combined with high natural "armor" from his girth). My players decided they didn't have the heart to kill him, so they just grappled him and pinned him to the floor.

The cultists managed to open a Hell portal before they were defeated. After destroying a few demons that came through, the party decided this is their best chance to get into Hell. However, they decided to test the portal first by throwing Neckbeard through it. They couldn't tell what happened to him, so they all just jumped through before the portal collapsed.

They discovered that Neckbeard had survived the journey and was stuck in Hell with them. After killing some demons and settling in for the "night," the party grilled Neckbeard for information. He tearfully explained that he never wanted to hurt anyone-he just had extremely poor judgement when making friends, and inadvertently got sucked into the cult after too much Dungeons & Dragons and Harry Potter.

The party perform confession and an exorcism on him to be on the safe side, after which Neckbeard joined the party as a player character.

We first met him in a Runepunk game, where he was a hub, someone who both handed out jobs and figured out the best places to sell loot. He was considered most awesome because when the party first met him, he was in a bar that obviously revolved around him, getting himself and the party drinks without ever saying a word, and barely a gesture.

But the attachment didn't show itself for the Runepunk Crowley.

We were doing a two-shot campaign to test the Active Exploits diceless RPG system, and our party was going to meet a client for a big job. We entered the mansion and the butler showed us to the library, where Mr. Crowley sat at the desk.

Dead.

But Ryan saw the distraught and surprised faces we had, so when we told the butler, he poked his head and said "Oh, dear, someone's killed me again." and revealed himself to be the real Mr. Crowley.

On an amusing side note: Later, when we were discussing the mission, one of us asked Mr. Crowley to illuminate him, so Mr. Crowley gestured and made him glow slightly.

My first time GMing for non-family, none of my players were armor-wearers, so I added a Sheriff's deputy. She was just a heavily-armored goon with a giant sword to fill the empty role in the party, in case I had accidentally made the encounters too hard.

The players treated her just like she was another player, offering her a share of the loot and everything. She has become one of the main npc contacts in the town, and is privy to some really sensitive information.

She can't go adventuring with the party anymore, since we acquired a PC that had her exact power set, but she still functions as a source of information.

I've had two instances of this, one in Pathfinder, the other in Shadowrun 3E.

In Pathfinder, the party had encountered a fortress full of kobolds, ogres and trolls. During the fight, the party ignored one kobold archer, despite the fact that he had hit every shot, even if he did minimal damage. The party became attached to the 'Value Kobold' or VK, and eventually the alchemist botched throwing a bomb, which landed right next to the VK. Distraught, the alchemist ate three attacks of opportunity to run up to the VK and feed him a healing potion. The kobold was so thankful for saving his life, that he pledged his service to the alchemist in return, becoming a DM PC. A few sessions later, in the introductory battle to the big bad, he was knocked out, and the big bad squished his head as an example of what meddling would bring. The entire party was sad and ended up getting a second wind and fought him off. Then they held a touching funeral for their fallen comrade.

In Shadowrun, one of the party members (a Dragon shaman) had gained a reputation in the Redmond Barrens as 'The Silver Goose,' like the golden goose that lays golden eggs, but with silverware. When an attempted robbery went down, she killed the robbers, gaining the reputation as a badass shaman.
Cut to five runs later, the party returns to Redmond to do another job, when they see a pair of folks cross the street to avoid them. The street samurai decided to chase them, with the shaman following after. When the pair ran into a gang hideout, the chase was called off. Two days later, they recognize one of the people they chased off at the Seattle University they were scoping out. They confronted him and intimidated him into explaining their avoidance, which he explained stemmed from the "Silver Goose" reputation. That was supposed to be the end of that character, but then the street samurai's player and the shaman's player started OOC roleplaying a scene straight out of a shoujo anime between the street samurai and the man, who's name was Timmy. Everyone at the table was paralyzed with laughter for about five minutes, and I knew that this character had to come back to make that scene a reality. It hasn't happened yet, but Timmy has been seen every so often to take the party in new and interesting directions, like drug dens, where the street samurai became addicted to Better Than Life Simchips.
That's when I decided that Timmy would be the big bad for the party's character arc. I built his character, and made him a shaman of the Seductress. His goal is to ruin the party because "The Silver Goose" killed his brother, who was one of the original robbers that gave her the reputation. I can't wait to see how that pans out, and how the party reacts.

Thanks to the fact that two of the PCs in one of my live games can talk to inanimate objects, pretty much anything the DM throws at us has the potential to become a recurring NPC/pseudo-party member. We do try not to overuse it, although my character is a bit more likely to talk to random inanimate objects thanks to growing up a lonely rich kid with only those objects to talk to.

Well, the D&D campaign I'm running now has an imp paladin thanks to this. The imp was supposed to be an annoying source of information that the party couldn't wait to get rid of. Instead the party druid decided he was cute, and adopted him as the party mascot. The paladin part came later.

I was running a freeform zombie game, and while it didn't last long, one of the players got rather attached to an Officer Banks... which was amusing, because as I recall all he did was "greet" the group when they arrived at the police station and generally act as though he didn't think much of the PCs. I didn't even give him a name until prompted.

Meanwhile, my pair of officers who I wanted to actually be prominent, Patterson and Morris, an idealistic cop/realistic cop duo... weren't ignored, per se, but weren't quite latched on to.

Crystal is a Witch working with the Seekers, meant at first to just be a one-off mentor for our PC Witch. Chivalry is a Paladin who was gonna get killed off at some point, partially to show that this is all Srs Bsns. Instead, he's now getting married to one of the Main Cast, and thus has an entire background and everything.

Crystal and Chiv are also connected through more than the Seekers, too. Now, we're going off to fight an Aboleth (Abeloth?) at Level 6 because it's Crystal's Patron and is magically forcing her to be sterile or else it kills Still, Chivalry's father, because Still killed the Aboleth's brethren (and Crystal is an old Party member of Still's, therefore connecting everything).

Our group loves us some NPCs, lemme tell ya.

Thought up some more, in fact!

My character, Overwatch, has a younger sister named Overlook (Our mom's name is Overture; see the theme?), who I had once joked has a crush on X, a Leatherwing Paladin of the Moon Princess. As part of a plotpoint, she comes home worried one night that I'd be angry at her, because she was Chosen by the Sun Queen to be her Oracle (thus making her an Over Seer). X (the PC) has also recently been Chosen to be the new Oracle's Champion and Personal Paladin/bodyguard.

In our last session, due to two crit-fails, she fell into a body of water with a giant sea-monster/dinosaur. The GM had come to love her character so much, he gave us every opportunity to save her (Including having her use Sanctuary twice with something like 3x its actual range, and NOT HAVING THE THING TRY AND BITE HER WHILE SHE'S HALF IN ITS MOUTH), just so he wouldn't have to kill her off.

Then there's Harvest, a mare so badass she calls the God of Death to help mop up a mess, Mirrored Image, a Sea Pony filly adopted by Harvest, and minorly plot-relevant, and pretty much every other NPC, including my character's pre-game dead marefriend (Nightlace; she started as a reason why my Rogue hates killing needlessly), and my character's current fiance (Dappled Spirit, retconned as the one who dragged Overwatch out of his suicidal depression after it became too much), as well as our favored Merchant (My character's not allowed to talk to him anymore; I rolled a Nat-1 on a Diplomacy check to get a better deal, and ended up making it seem like I was hitting on him, including my asking him if he'd "like to learn some dance moves" as payment).

Ohhhh, yeah. We're all about the NPCs in our game. xD We've already started planning on foal names for two of our PCs' *KIDS.*

My group -tried- to get attached to an NPC, but since it was an Adventurer's League game and they tend to stick pretty tight to the rails...

The party had intimidated a kobold into leading us to his hideout (a mage with Burning Hands and a grip big enough to wrap around your head is quite an incentive), and was willing to help us deal with the guards. Letting him scout ahead wasn't as bad an idea as it sounds; him distracting a later patrol with stories about the big, vicious adventurers they had survived gave us a surprise round when we tromped up out of the dark and started flinging fire around.

Unfortunately, given that the modules don't really allow for too much deviation, we left him behind as the new lord of the cave. Although if we get that GM again and a module that takes back into that neck of the woods, I wouldn't doubt that we'd be hearing about the powerful nest that's been making life miserable for the nearby towns.

I'm paraphrasing, but I remember hearing a story once, probably in the comments for an earlier comic, about a group who after killing a dragon or something found a little mute girl who was supposed to just be a plot element. She also couldn't leave the room, but the group persevered until the dm relented and let them keep the little girl with them as they continued their adventure.

Ah, mute characters. My favorite was a dire wolf who communicated with these statues he caved with his claws. Each one was about six to eight inches tall, and he would wordlessly mime out scenarios with them by moving them around. It was the best mute character I ever had.

The image of something like that makes me want to make a character like that.

My only mute character was a half-orc brawler who just gave up on speaking (cause he couldn't actually speak), and just did spoke with whatever objects he had on him (usually a deck of cards). It made it so great that he was also four foot, and threw his healing ally as (the GM of the game quoted) a magic missle.

The introduction had him kidnapping the cleric. He carried her back to his little cave, and posed her. She didn't resist the posing, she was much more curious than scared. He ran off, and she got up to look around. He came back with a log, and placed it on a raised stone platform in front of the cave. He laboriously posed her again. Sitting japanese style, hands on her legs, head bowed.

When she tried to look up, he would bark at her. She heard wood splintering, and when the party found them half an hour later, he was placing a little wooden statue in her lap. Well, after that, she wouldn't let the party kill the sweetest animal she had ever met, and I became a party member!

The campaign only lasted three sessions, but by the end of it, I was invited to stay with the cleric's holy order, carving statues of the gods, finding lost things, and having a happy ending.

Once I made a mime class for mute characters. I figure that if a bard can get magical powers from his music, then someone who can't talk and has to mime everything will probably get magical powers from it too. I never actually played the class though.

Okay, I'll pose this question to you because I'm honestly curious. It's made clear that the Perform Skill isn't always about music, or even sound, but several aspects of the Bard class are designed under the assumption that you're making sound. Like how Bard spells always have a Verbal component even if they wouldn't otherwise. How would a Mime Bard handle strictly sound-based aspects of the class?

Like Raxon said, by using something other than their voices - say, instruments - to make sounds. Mimes don't speak; that doesn't mean they are necessarily silent. Even a mime can be heard when walking on a field of dried leaves.

I love the emotional transition on the party from the third to the fifth panels. It really shows everyone's second nature (to an extent). Mostly though, I like how everyone except Rainbow is either shocked or suprised, and Rainbow just looks mad.

I love today's story time. :D Those are my absolute favorite kinds of RP stories.

Wishing I had a story like that, but I've still never had a session where things didn't go exactly the way I planned them to, because I still haven't found a player who ever has ideas. I want someone to throw me off the rails just once! So I can have a real story like a normal DM! Yeesh...

I got to finally partake in the stream last week and I had a blast and some of my jokes made it into the recording Which I enjoyed. I look forward to the next stream, maybe the group will adopt a new npc ^_^ I'm sure spud would love that. Also I hope that "gif" returns that thing was amazing

ok, so, I ran a Mage the Ascension campaign that ran for 2 years real time, with there being 2-4 sessions a week, with each session being 4-8 hours. I 'inherited' the campaign from someone else who started it out with an insane mage changing reality into something out of a video game, complete with temporary power ups and one ups. (the original GM had his girlfriend break up with him, so he freaked out, and moved across the country) Before I got the GM job, the PCs had found an extra life.

Mage being the most philosophical of the original World of Darkness games, I decided that the insane mage was actually not REALLY insane but had discovered the mythical ability to alter his personal world view of how magic worked. His games were an attempt to teach others this ability. For the PCs it worked. Basically it gave them a bonus to using magick and not having reality say "you know you can't do that right?" and beat them over the head with a baseball bat.

This lead the PCs off on a quest to discover some of the other philosophies of the world. The goth met up with vampires, and a couple of the characters made friends with the local werewolves. One of the werewolves was the head shaman of the local group, and became a den mother to the PCs, and ended up being a body guard, and later, girlfriend to one of the PCs.

So of course she dies in one of the big battles against a powerful spirit.

the PCs freak out. they LOVE this character. they pull out the 1-up. I'd completely forgotten about it, but I needed this character to die to show the stakes in the battle were serious. They give her the 1-up.

She vanishes.

Queue freak out.

thinking quickly, I tell them that it wasn't like a phoenix down from Final Fantasy, instead it was more like her soul had been sent to a respawn point, and they had no way of knowing who or where she would return. the PCs remind me that they had 'tagged' her with spirit magic so they would be able to find her in the spirit planes, and that is attached to her soul. So they can and will find her again.

Six months later real time (a year or 2 later game time) they find themselves facing off against one of the enemy generals. I get an evil idea. I tell them the soul tracking spell pings.

they all freak out and are thrilled. they all do a search. it is the enemy general, and she has just ordered their deaths.
and then I end the session for a week.

Oh jeez, that's brutal. If I were the PC who was her boyfriend in her past life, I'd never stop trying to get through to her, to somehow reconnect with her. Depending on the depths of our connection, perhaps I would even obey if she asked me to kill my comrades in exchange for me becoming her consort again...

I'm Imagining what the DM might say if they roll a Nat 1...
Maybe something such as...
DM:You believe she is saying that's where she buried your friends corpse
Or...
DM:You think she is saying She is right there but is both intangible and deaf
Or even...
DM:From what you can tell she is just fucking with you

Vinny the Ferryman.
Who will take you across one of the rivers in the underworld in exchange for a drink that isn't chocolate flavored. He had a brooklyn accent. He was also one of the few people in the underworld that wasn't a complete dick.
Naturally we would bring several non-chocolate flavored drinks to him and visit and talk to him when we had no real need to do so. It came to the point that he would just take us across for free because we would just keep giving him drinks but not actually cross the river.